Mind the Gap

The effects of disasters are mediated by a society’s existing structures and thus reveal its fault lines. Although disaster planning since 2005 has explicitly noted the question of gender and national Plans for Gender Equality have explicitly mentioned disaster response, only 3.6 per cent of disaster preparedness council members at prefectural level were women. A quarter of prefectures had no female members at all.

In many of the communities affected by the tsunami and its aftermath women were in charge of caring for others, and so had to deal with the short supply of sanitary napkins and nappies (for babies as well as for the elderly), infant formula and baby food.

The LDP has been rated by the Women’s Action Network as being among the worst of all political parties in Japan when it comes to gender issues. The LDP has only been supportive of gender policies when they could be directly linked to economic growth and boosting the birth rate. In Abe’s UN speech and in his actual policy decisions, ‘womenomics’ is a policy for recharging the economy and refortifying the nation, not for improving the situation of women.

NECESSARY READING. This in-depth, beautifully designed and written article explores the roots of video games and gendered marketing. As a child of the 90s, I never saw the marketing of the first games, and this was a real eye-opener. This article is an incredibly important example of how culture creates gendered divisions and how gender “norms” are not static at all. Many thanks to redcow for sharing the link with me.

The video game industry created something of a chicken-and-egg situation. When it conducted market research during the ’80s and ’90s, it found that more boys than girls played video games. Boys were more likely to be involved with new technology, more willing to be early adopters and more encouraged by their teachers and families to pursue science, technology, engineering and math in school. Girls have always played video games, but they weren’t the majority. In wake of the video game crash, the game industry’s pursuit of a safe and reliable market led to it homing in on the young male. And so the advertising campaigns began. Video games were heavily marketed as products for men, and the message was clear: No girls allowed.

Kathryn also shared this article with me. Feminist Disney is a great example of how to created detailed ratings for films based on intersectional feminism: “Promotion/Equal Voice given to women, Representation of Women present, Racism/Classism, LGBTQ representation, and Gender Binary adherence.” This review also reviews other reviews of the film.

It’s not accidental at all that children’s films challenging sexism are ALWAYS set in the distant past and usually involve conflicts that are not relevant or particularly value challenging to today’s U.S. audience (corsets and otherwise constraining clothing, arranged marriages, etc). These plotlines often situate sexism as a problem the modern world has solved.

The follow-up to the prior article with some examples of animation, including Disney’s, that has a more balanced representation of body size. I get that animated bodies are often exaggerated, but it’s useful to look at how the exaggeration happens and if there’s a difference in characters based on their sex or gender identity. (Genderqueer examples: Oscar and Andre’s [Berubara] physical similarity to each other; meanwhile, Utena’s physical similarity to Anthy and their smallness compared to upperclassmen guys [Revolutionary Girl Utena].)